You are faced with a long cold winter and many days where the kids will be bored senseless. If you are not careful that boredom can turn into big trouble. What is a parent to do?

Disney has just the book for you. Disney’s Family Fun Crafts book created by Deanna F. Cook and the experts at Family Fun Magazine, is stuffed full of 500 fun, easy, and inexpensive arts and crafts ideas guaranteed to keep your little ones occupied for hours on end. From shadow silhouettes to egg carton critters to origami, parents will find activities for kids of all ages. Read the rest of this entry

St. Patrick’s Day evokes images of Ireland, green and pots of gold. Here are a few games and activities to make your St. Patrick’s Day celebrations a little more fun.

Shamrock cookies – A favorite treat this time of year is shamrock cookies. Use your favorite sugar cookie recipe, or purchase refrigerated cookie dough. If you don’t have a shamrock shaped cookie cutter, you could use a heart shaped one. Cut three hearts, putting the points together, and then add a small strip of dough for the stem. There are a few options for making them green: you could add green food coloring to the dough, sprinkle them with green sugar before baking, or use green frosting -with or without sprinkles. They are sure to be a delicious treat.

Find the Pot o’ Gold – A fun treasure hunt game can keep kids entertained for quite a while. Make a pot from a small plastic bucket and some gold paper, or you could fill the bucket with gold coin candy. The children could take turns being the leprechaun and hide the pot o’ gold, and the other children can hunt for the treasure. The kids could either simply look for it or make it a game of hot and cold, with the leprechaun giving hints as to where the gold is hidden. Another variation is to hide the individual candy coins around the area and let the children look for them.

Rainbow Mobile – Create a simple rainbow mobile that will make nice decorations for your St. Patrick’s Day party. Start with a paper plate, cut in half, and cut out the center to make the rainbow. Color the rainbow colors, using paint, markers or crayons. Cut out a shamrock from green construction paper. You can also make a pot of gold, using black for the pot and a few gold coins from yellow paper. Provide the kids with patterns to trace around. Put a small hole in the top of the rainbow and at the bottom of both ends. Attach the shamrock and pot of gold to both ends. Hang the mobile with the string from the top of the bow. You can make a simpler version for younger children with all shamrocks from the end of the rainbows.

Leprechaun Hat – A cute table favor that the kids can make is a leprechaun hat. Take Styrofoam coffee cups, turn them upside down on a foil lined cookie sheet. Place them in the oven on low for a few minutes and watch them as they change. When it looks like a hat brim has formed, remove them from the oven and let cool. Once they are cooled, they can be painted green. Cut black strips to make a band and gold to make buckles to glue on it. Decorate them with small shamrocks if you want.

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Once your child enters school, they are able to learn even more than you have started to teach them at home. Don’t let that learning stop at school. Here are some great ideas for fun and educational games that you can play with your school age children to reinforce what they learn in school.

Kids are older now so the games can be more advanced. At this age, most kids love to play outdoors. Why not grab your sneakers and head outdoors with them!

When I was seven or eight, we used to play hopscotch outside. With sidewalk chalk, we would draw our hopscotch squares. The squares alternate between one square on top of two squares on top of one square. The pattern continues until you have ten squares. Each square is numbered.

Using a marble, you throw it so that it lands on one of the numbered squares. You have to jump to that square and pick up the marble. There can only be one foot in a square so you have to balance on one foot while you pick up the marble to throw again. You are the person to beat if you can make it successfully down and back without falling off a square or stepping two feet in one square.

Now that the kids have been reading for a couple of years or more, they can have some fun in the kitchen. Kitchen activities can be educational. Start with something easy like a cookie recipe for them to decipher. Let the kids read the recipe and help to assemble the ingredients. Give them a variety of measuring cups and spoons to work with.

They have to figure out the recipe measurements from the utensils that you have given to them. You may end up with flour all over the counter but it is a good learning experience for them. Besides, you’ll get some sweet treats out of the deal!

If kids like to read and act, let them put on a skit. Each child must choose a favorite scene from their favorite book. Using puppets that they make themselves, they must act out the scene. The rest of the family will try to guess what the name of the book is. The skit can be as long as they need it to be. Designate a parent to help with the crafts and stay out of the guessing.

Stargazing is a fun way to spend an evening. Many kids have heard that the moon is made of green cheese. This is one way to prove that it isn’t. Through a telescope they can see stars, constellations, the moon, and meteor showers up close and personal. As they become more accomplished at it, they can read star charts to find where in the sky certain stars exist.

As your kids age, you can play more and more games to increase their knowledge. Try card games, board games and other outdoor games that use the skills they are learning in school. The key to a love of learning is to take the pressure off by making it a fun thing to do.